Verify the Vote - Stand Up for Accountable Elections!

Democracy is government by the people, and the right to vote is critical to determining what each of us wants of our government. Nearly one-quarter of American voters—more than 35 million people—will exercise that right using electronic voting (e-voting) terminals in the next presidential election. Unfortunately, due to e-voting equipment that has been hastily developed and poorly tested, your right to vote is in greater jeopardy than ever before. There are widespread reports of voting terminal failures, and growing concern about the (in)security of these machines is fueling fierce debate over how to ensure the integrity of our elections.

One of the key problems is that many machines cannot be audited to verify that they are correctly recording each person's intended vote. And while new voting technology promises fully accessible, private voting for Americans with disabilities and non-English speakers, machines that cannot verifiably record and tally votes break that promise. This is not an acceptable foundation for our democracy.

There must be fully accessible, private voting for Americans with disabilities and non-English speakers.

There must be transparency in voting-system development and testing, and especially in computerized voting. Computer code used in elections must be open to independent scrutiny.

EFF has made progress on several fronts, including launching a
grassroots activism campaign that helped convince California
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to mandate voter-verifiable paper
trails for state elections by 2006. This is a great start -
but we need your help to take the fight nationwide.

How You Can Help:

EFF is launching a 3-month "Verify the Vote" campaign:
http://www.eff.org/e-vote/ Help us raise $250,000 by
July 1st, and we'll use the funds to keep the fight for
voter-verifiable elections alive through the 2004 election
and beyond. Every dollar counts, so donate today at
https://secure.eff.org/

Write your representatives and ask them to support the
Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003
(S. 1980 and H.R. 2239), which requires openly reviewed
software and voter-verifiable paper audit trails for all
new e-voting machines.

Since decisions to purchase e-voting machines are made at
the county level, let your local elections officials know
that any machines purchased should have voter-verifiable paper
audit trails.

Contact your Secretary of State to encourage him or her to
pursue policies that establish responsible criteria for the
types of e-voting machines that can be adopted by your
state.

Finally, we encourage you to support the other organizations
joining this campaign. If we work together now, we can help
save the November elections, as well as provide a roadmap for
preserving our democracy in the years to come.

Op-ed: "TSA and CAPPS II - Anatomy of a Cover Up"

On Good Friday evening, after everyone, including its own
spokespeople, had gone home, American Airlines quietly admitted
that in 2002, it secretly transferred passenger data to
government contractors. Specifically, the airline provided
1.2 million passenger records to contractors developing
prototypes for the Transportation Security Administration's
(TSA) controversial Computer Assisted Passenger-Profiling
System (CAPPS II). These records contain detailed personal
information, such as your name, address, phone number, travel
itinerary - even your credit card number.

American admitted to the transfer only after several months of
official denials by TSA, which repeatedly claimed that it
never used real passenger data for CAPPS II testing.

Our conclusion: Either TSA has been lying to us about CAPPS II,
or its officers are incompetent.

We'll be charitable to the officers and assume that TSA lied.

The Tip-off: JetBlue Passes the Torch Data

The first clue was dropped in September of 2003, when Edward
Hasbrouck discovered that JetBlue had secretly supplied over
five million passenger records to Torch Concepts, a U.S.
Department of Defense contractor. Torch was engaged in
data-mining research - specifically, to develop techniques for
flagging air passengers as potential terrorists.

Sounds suspiciously like CAPPS II, doesn't it? And then the
situation got even more suspicious: it was revealed that TSA
not only knew about but actually facilitated the JetBlue/Torch
data hand-off. Yet TSA somehow managed to keep its hands clean: because neither TSA nor its contractors possessed the
data in question, it violated the spirit rather than the
letter of federal privacy laws.

The Pattern: A Second "Data Valdez"

Shortly after the JetBlue scandal broke, Northwest Airlines
admitted to handing over to NASA three months' worth of
passenger records - once more for data-mining research.

Again, TSA's hands were technically clean. And again, the
denials kept coming: even after the news broke about
Northwest, TSA flatly denied possessing real passenger data
or using it to test CAPPS II. (Well, not quite - it did admit
to using the records of 32 TSA employees who had consented
to be guinea pigs.)

TSA made these denials to the press; to its bosses at the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when the department
was investigating the JetBlue scandal; and to the General
Accounting Office (GAO) when it was investigating CAPPS II.
It even told Congress directly that it never used real
passenger records for CAPPS II testing.

Yet now we can draw no other conclusion than that TSA lied.

Fool Me Thrice

Despite all of this, we are expected to trust TSA with a
comprehensive database of all our personal travel details -
just as we are expected to trust 1.) a Justice Department
handed an astonishing amount of surveillance power in the
weeks after 9/11, 2.) an FBI seeking to implement a
surveillance state on the Internet, and 3.) government
programs working to enable total information awareness of
everything we say or do.

We're not buying it, and we don't think you should, either.

Please: stand up for your rights as a U.S. citizen and demand
that Congress put an end to the lies by fully and publicly
investigating TSA and CAPPS II. We deserve to know the truth
about our travel privacy. There are already a few Senators
asking the right questions, but your voice - right now - could
make a real difference: http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2888

Finally, if you aren't one already, please consider becoming a
member of EFF - because that would make a real difference, too.
Having more members gives us significantly more muscle with
lawmakers, the press and the public at large. Each and every
membership - even yours - counts.

Sun Microsystems, Craigslist Donate Linux Servers and Bandwidth

We would like to thank Sun Microsystems for generously donating
two new Sun Fire v65x web servers to EFF, and Craigslist for
providing us with the bandwidth and rack space to run them. The
two Linux servers are being used to host the EFF website.

Donations like this one help to ensure that EFF has the resources
necessary to continue to fight the good fight for freedom online.

(Mis)Educating Children About Copyright
The Boston Globe with an excellent piece on the one-sided copyright
"education" that Hollywood is foisting upon middle-schoolers:http://www.eff.org/cgi/tiny?urlID=189

Acacia Underscores Need for Patent Busting
The company wants to file a class-action suit against porn companies
that may have violated its video-streaming patents. If Acacia wins,
expect similar claims against G-rated businesses:http://www.xbiz.com/news_piece.php?id=2984

Another Bad Tech "Solution" to P2P
Palisade Systems is partnering with Audible Magic to offer a tool
that scans email, IM and other Net traffic for copyrighted
material and breaks connections mid-transfer - regardless of
whether the transmission is legal:http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39152667,00.htm

Wisconsin Sues DirecTV
Alas, not over its shakedown campaign - the state Attorney General
is taking the company to task for failing to inform customers
of certain rights:http://www.eff.org/cgi/tiny?urlID=191
(TwinCities.com; registration unfortunately required.)

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